After the King: Stories in Honor of J.R.R. Tolkien

Down the River Road Gregory Benford

The boy continued down the silver river in search of his father.

He crouched in his skiff, swaying with the rippling currents, and watched his trawling line. He had not eaten for two days. A fat yellow fish shimmered far down in the filmy water but would not bite.

Curiosity overcame hunger and he leaned over to see if the fish was nosing about his line. Instead of plump prey he saw himself, mirrored in a tin-grey metal current. But his image wore the cane hat he had lost overboard yesterday. He stared down into the trapped timeflow, which had kept pace with his skiff’s downtime glide, and studied his optimistic gaze of yesterday—with smudged forehead and sprigs of greasy hair jutting around his big ears.

He edged back from the lip of the shallow-bottomed skiff.

The liquid metal current was rising through the skin of water. It could sink him with a casual brush. Danger dried his mouth, tightened his throat.

Down through murky water he had glimpsed a slow churn of ivory radiance, mercury which shaped and roiled the broad, mud-streaked course. Treachery lurked in that metallic upwelling—oblong-shaped many-armers, electric vipers, fanged things that glided through the metal currents like broad-winged birds.

He lay still in the skiff bottom, hoping the time-dense flow would subside. A queasy temporal swell oozed through his gangly body, and to distract himself from the nausea he gazed up at the great spreading forest which hung overhead.

Patches of bare worldwall shimmered there, opulent with smoldering glows. The world was tubular, its sole great river a shiny snake that wound through bluffs and forests. Downriver, the vast bore of his circumscribed cosmos faded into mist. He could see a sizable city there beside a shimmering bend in the river. Behind him, uptime, he could make out the immense curve of the world and its rich hills until perspective warped and blurred them. He was tempted to take out his binoculars to see—

A thump against the skiff. Something heavy, moving.

He held his breath. Normally the skiff moved feather-light, responding to the rub and press of the air’s very compression behind him as he voyaged down the silver river and thus accelerated through time.

Irregular patches of bare crust overhead gave forth smatterings of prickly light. He wished for a moment of darkness, to hide him. There was no sun here, and the boy had never seen a star to know what that word meant. Light came splintering down from the crust spots, like volcanoes of iridescence spattering the land on the opposite curve of the world-tube. He knew as well, but only because his father had told him, that these shifting colors were the transmuted glow of monstrous collisions between unknown energies, distant flares vast and unknowable, the unfurling heritage of meaningless violence beyond human ken.

Something worried the water’s surface.

He sat up and reached for his paddle and a skinny thing shot out of the water and snapped past his head. He ducked and slapped the tendril with his paddle. A knobby head with slitted yellow eyes heaved up from the wrinkled water. It smoked acrid green, out of its metal element, and struck at him again. He swung the paddle. It caught the tendril and sliced through.

The mercury-beast bleated and splashed and was gone. He dug into the water with the paddle—half its blade sheared cleanly off—and thrust hard. Splashing behind.

He labored into deeper water. The green fumes swirled away. When the currents calmed he veered toward shore. The big-jawed predator could snap him from the surface in an instant, crunch his skiff in two, if it could extend out of the low-running streams of silver-grey mercury and ruddy bromium. A turbulent swell had brought it up, and might again.

His arms burned and his breath rasped well before the prow ran aground. Hurriedly he splashed ashore, tugging a frayed rope. He got the skiff up onto a mud flat and into a copse and slid it far back to hide it among leafy branches.

Pondering and weak, he fetched forth some stringy dried blue meat to quiet the rumble in his stomach.

He peered overhead at the curved canopy of distant forest and patchy mud flats. These told him nothing of what he could expect here beside the river, of course, and he decided to explore a little. This was far down the river. He had fallen asleep last night again, sucked into slumber by a darkening of the world-tube, and might have drifted at a fair clip past Lord knew how many reefs and towns. The silent enormity of the river insulated a lonely skiff from the rhythms of land and made coasting downstream and downtime natural, silkily inevitable.

He walked upshore, into the silent press of time that felt at first like a mild summer’s breeze but drained the energy of anyone who worked against it. As he went he eyed the profusion of stalks and trunks and tangled blue-green masses which crouched close to the river’s edge. No signs of people. So he was unprepared for the man with a duckbill blunderbuss who stepped from behind a massive tree trunk and just grinned.

“What’s the name?” the man asked, spitting first.

“John.”

“Walking upriver?”

Better to skirt the question than to lie. “Looking for food.”

“Find any?”

“Hardly had a chance to.”

“Couldn’ta come far. Big storm just downstream from here.” The man grinned broadly, showing brown teeth, lips thin and bloodless. “I saw it pull a man’s arms off.”

So he knew John couldn’t have just strolled here from downstream. John said casually, “I walked down from the point, the one with the big old dead tree.”

“I know that place, been there once. Plenty berries and footfruit there. Why come lookin’ here?”

“I heard there’s a big city this way.”

“More like a town, kid. Me, I think you oughta stay out here in the wild with us.”

“Who’s ‘us’?”

“Some fellas.” The man’s fixed grin soured at the edges.

“I got to be getting on, mister.”

“This baby here says you got fresh business.” He displayed the blunderbuss as though he had invented it.

“I got no money.”

“Don’t want or need money, boy. Your kind, my friends will sure enjoy seeing you.”

He gestured with the blunderbuss for John to walk. John saw no easy way to get around the big weapon so he strode off, the man following at a cautious distance.

The blunderbuss was in fact the ornate fruit of a tree John had once seen. The weapons grew as hard pods on the slick-barked trees and had to be sawed off when they swelled to maturity. This one had a flange that opened into a gnarled ball and then flared further into the butt—all part of the living weapon, which if stuck butt-down in rich soil, with water and daylight, grew cartridges for the gun. From the size of the butt he guessed that this was a full-grown weapon and would carry plenty of shots.

He stumbled through a tangle of knife grasses, hearing the man snicker at his awkwardness, and then came to a pink clay path. Plainly this man planned to bring him to some kind of mean-spirited reception, and the boy had not a clue about what that could mean. Simple thieving, or a spot of buggery—these he had heard of and even witnessed.

But the man’s rapt, hot-eyed gaze spoke of more. Something beyond a boy’s world, from the unknown swamp of adulthood.

What should he do? His mind churned fruitlessly.

John’s breath rasped and quickened as he took his time on the steepening path. Like most footways, this one moved nearly straight away from the river, and thus a traveler suffered neither the chilly press of uptime nor the nauseating slide of downtime. John judged the path would probably rise into the dry-brown foothills ahead. Insects hung and buzzed in the stillness of slumberous, sliding moments. A few bit.

He thought furiously. They passed through a verdant, hummocky field and then up ahead around a sharp bend the boy saw, just a few steps beyond, a deep shiny iron-grey stream that gurgled down toward the river, and a dead muskbat that lay in the gummy clay path.

A muskbat never smells grand and this one, at least a day dead, filled the air with a sharp reek.

John gave no sign, just held his breath. The stream murmured beside him. Its weak time-churn unsteadied his step only a little. A fallen branch and windstorm debris lay just a bit beyond the muskbat’s cracked and oozing blue-black skin.

He stepped straight over the muskbat and three steps more. As he turned the man breathed in the repulsive tang and his swarthy face contorted. The man drew back, foot in midair, and the blunderbuss wavered away.

John snatched up the branch. Without meaning to he sucked in the putrid fumes. He had to clench his throat tight to stop his stomach from betraying him. He leaped at the man. In midair he swung the branch, wood seeking wood, and felt a sharp jolt as he connected.

“Ah!” the man cried in pain. The blunderbuss sprang into the air and tumbled crazily into the stream—

—which dissolved the gun with a stinging hiss and explosive puff of fragrant orange steam. The man gaped at this, at John—and took a step back.

“Now you,” John said because he could think of nothing else.

He got the words out at his lowest bass register. With a devouring metal rivulet nearby, any wrestling could bring disintegrating death in a flicker. John felt his knees turn to water, his heart jump into his throat.

The man fled. Scampered away with a little hoarse cry.

John blinked in surprise and then beat his own retreat, to escape the virulent muskbat fumes. He stopped at the edge of a viny tangle and looked back at the stream.

His chest filled with sudden pride. He had faced down a full-grown man. He!

Only later did he realize that the man was legitimately more frightened than John was—for he faced a wild-eyed boy of some muscle, ungainly but armed with a fair-sized club. So the man had prudently escaped, his dirty shirt-tail flapping like a harrying rebuke behind him.

John skirted away from the foothills, in case the swarthy man came looking with his friends. He headed downstream, marching until sleep overcame him. By keeping a good long distance from the river he hoped to avoid the time storm the man had mentioned—assuming it wasn’t a lie.

The river was always within view from any fair-sized rise, since the land curved up toward the territories overhead. The sheen of clear water blended with the ruddy mud flats at this distance, so that John could barely pick out the dabs of silver and tin-grey that spoke of deadly undercurrents.

He had arisen and found some mealy brush fruit for breakfast and had set off again when he felt a prickling at the nape of his neck. A ripple passed by. It pinched his chest and stung his eyes. Hollow booms volleyed through the layered air.

He looked up. Across the misty expanse he could make out the far side of the world. It was a clotted terrain of hills and slumped valleys, thick with a rainbow’s wonder of plant life, dappled lakes, snaky streams—all tributaries to the one great river. As he watched, the overhead arch compressed, like an accordion he had seen an old lady playing once—and then the squeezing struck him as well. Clutched his ribs, strained at his neck and ankles as though trying to pull him apart. Trees creaked, teetered, and one old black one crashed over nearby. He lay on moist, fragrant humus where he had fallen and watched the massive constriction of his entire world inch its way downstream, a compression wave passing and then relaxing, like the digesting spasm of a great beast. Strata groaned, rocks shattered. A final peal like a giant’s hammer rolled over the leafy canopy.

He had only seen five ripples in all his life and this one was more unsettling, for as he watched it proceed on he saw through his binoculars for the first time the spires of the city, and saw one tumble in a glimmering instant as the great wave passed. Somehow he had thought of cities—or towns, as the man had said, a word strange to John—as grand places free of the rub of raw nature, invulnerable.

He moved on quickly. A purple radiance played among the ripe forest, shed by a big patch of raw worldwall which stretched beside a shiny lake, far across the world. Thoughts of the city possessed him, ideas of how to track his father, and so he forgot the time storm.

At first he felt a wrenching in the pit of his stomach. Then the humid air warped, perverting perspectives, and confusion rode the winds.

His feet refused to land where he directed them unless he kept constant attention, his narrowed eyes holding the errant limbs continually in view. Cordwood-heavy, his arms gained and lost weight as they swung. To turn his head without planning was to risk a fall. He labored on, panting. Hours oozed past. He ate, napped, kept on. The air sucked strength from muscles and sent itchy traceries playing on his skin.

The whispering tendrils of stupefaction left him as he angled toward the city. He sagged with fatigue. Three spires remained ahead, whitewash-bright, the most palatial place he had ever seen. Houses of pale polished wood were lined up neat and sure beside rock-roads laid arrow-straight with even the slate slabs cut square and true.

These streets thronged with more people than John could count. Ladies in finery stepping gingerly over horse dung, coarse frolickers lurching against walls, tradesmen elephantine and jolly, foul-witted quarrelers, prodigious braggarts, red-faced hawkers of everything from sweets to saws. All swarming like busybody insects and abuzz with talk.

To John it was like trying to take a drink from a waterfall. He wandered the gridded streets unnoticed, acutely conscious of his ragged clothes and slouch hat. He sought the one thing he did know, the river.

Along the big stone quay men loafed in the rising, insect-thronged heat. They slouched in split-bottomed chairs tilted back to the point of seeming dynamical impossibility, chins on chests, hats tipped down over drowsy eyes. A six-legged sow and her brood grunted by, doing a good business in droppings from split crates.

Beyond this slow scene lay the river, half-shadowed by the fitful radiance of three overhead worldwall patches, shining richly where the light struck it sure. John took off his pack and sat on a wharf railing and looked at the river’s ceaseless undulation, broken by shards of raw silver which broke the surface, fumed, and were gone.

“Lookin’ for work?”

The voice was rough. It belonged to a boy somewhat older than John but bigger, broad shoulders bursting his crosshatched shirt. But the eyes were dreamy, warm.

“Might be.” He would need money here.

“Got some unloadin’ to do. Never ’nuff hands.” The young man held out a broad palm. They shook. “Name’s Stan.”

“Mine’s John. Heavy stuff?”

“Moderate. We got droners to help.”

Stan jabbed a thumb at a line of five slumped figures seated along the jetty. John had seen these before, only upriver they were called Zoms. They all sat the same way, legs sprawled out in front, arms slack, weight on the lower spine at a steep angle. No man could sit in that manner for long. Zoms didn’t seem to mind. Just about anything seemed better than being dead.

“You new?” Stan asked, squatting down beside John and scribbling something on a clipboard with a pencil stub.

“Just came in.”

“Raft?”

“Skiff. Landed up above that storm.”

Stan whistled. “And walked around? Long way. That ripple knock you flat?”

“Tried to.”

“Be a lotta trouble to get back to your skiff.”

“I might just push on down.”

“Really?” Stan brightened. “How far you come?”

“I don’t know.”

“Angel’s Point? Rockport?”

“I heard of them. Saw Alberts but it was foggy.”

“You’re from above Rockport? And just a kid?”

“I’m older than I look,” John said stiffly.

“You do have a funny accent.”

John gritted his teeth. “So do you, to my ear.”

“I thought, comin’ this far downtime, you’d get sick, go crazy, or something.” Stan seemed truly impressed, his eyes wide.

“I didn’t just shoot down.” That was a dumb mistake, even a boy knew that. “I stopped some to … explore.”

“For what?”

John shifted uneasily. He shouldn’t have said anything. The less people knew about you, the less they could use. “Treasure.”

“Like hydrogen? Big market for hydrogen chunks here.”

“No, more like—” John struggled to think of something that made sense. “Jewels. Ancient rubies and all.”

“No foolin’? I’ve never seen any.”

“They’re rare. Left over from the olden lords and ladies.”

Stan opened his mouth and stuck his tongue up into his front teeth in an expression of intense thought. “Uh … Who were they?”

“Primeval people. Ones from waaay uptime. They were so rich then, ‘cause there were so few of them, that the sapphires and gold just dripped off their wrists and necks.”

Wide-eyed now. “Earnest?”

“They had so much, it was like the dust in the road to them. Sometimes when they got bored, the ladies’d snatch up a whole gob of jewels, their very finest, all glittery and ripe, and they’d stick them all over some of those big hats they wore. Come a flood, people would drown and those jewel-fat hats would come downtime.”

“Hats?” Open-mouthed wonder.

An airy wave of his hand. “Not the slouch hats we wear down here. I’m talkin’ big boomer hats, made of, well, hydrogen itself.”

“Hydro—” Stan stopped, a look of puzzlement washing across his face, and John saw that he had to cover that one.

“See, those prehistoric days, hydrogen was even lighter than it is today. So they wore it. The very finest of people weaved it into fancy vests and collars and hats.”

A doubtful scowl. “I never saw anybody …”

“Well, see now, that’s just the thing. My point exactly. Those olden ladies and gents, they wore out all the hydrogen. That’s why it’s worth so much today.”

Stan’s mouth made an awe-struck O. “That’s wondrous, plain wondrous. I mean, I knew hydrogen was the lightest metal. Strongest, too. No puzzlement it’s what every big contractor and engine-builder wants, only can’t get. But”—he looked sharply at John—“how come you know?”

“How come a kid knows?” Might as well feed him back that remark. “Because uptime, we’re closer to the archaic ages. We look out for those hydrogen hats that came down the river and washed up.”

Stan frowned. “Then why’d you come down here?”

For an instant John had the sick feeling that he was caught out. The whole story was going to blow up on him. He would lose this job and go hungry tonight.

Then he blinked and said, “Uptime people already got the hats that came ashore there. It’s the ones that got past them that I’m after.”

“Aaahhh …” Stan liked this and at once began to shoot out questions about the grand hats and treasure hunting, how John did it, what he’d found, and so on. It was a relief when somebody called, “Induction ship!” and the sleepy quay came to life.

The big white ship seemed to John to snap into existence, trim and sharp as it bore down upon them. It cut the river, curling water like a foamy shield, sending gobbets of iron-grey liquid metal spraying before it.

It was a three-decker with gingerbread railings and a pyramid-shaped pilot house perched atop. Large, thick disks dominated each side, humming loudly as it decelerated. Only these induction disks, which had to cast their field lines deep into the river and thrust the great boat forward, were untouched by the eternal habit of ornamentation. Curlicues trickled down each stanchion. Pillars had to be crowned with ancient scroll-work, the flybridge carried sculptures of succoring angels, davits and booms and mastheads wore stubby golden helmets.

Passengers lined the ornate railings as the boat slowed, foam leaped in the air, and backwash splashed about the stone quay. A whistle sounded eerily and deck hands threw across thick ropes.

Stan caught one and looped it expertly about a stay. “Come on!”

Crowds had coagulated from somewhere, seeming to condense out of the humidity onto the jetty and quay. A hubbub engulfed the induction ship. Crates and bales descended on crane cables. Wagons rumbled forth to take them and John found himself in a gang of Zoms, tugging and wrestling the bulky masses. Crowds yawped and hailed and bargained with vortex energy all around.

The Zoms followed Stan’s orders sluggishly, their mouths popping open as they strained, drool running down onto their chests. These were corpses kindled back to life quite recently, and so still strong, though growing listless. Zoms were mostly men, since they were harvested for heavy manual labor. But a hefty woman labored next to John and between loads she put her hand on his leg, directly and simply, and then slipped her fingers around to cup his balls. John jerked away, her reek biting in his nostrils. Zoms hungered for life. Perhaps they knew that they would wither, dwindling into torpid befuddlement, within months. The heavy woman leered at him and felt his ass. He moved away from her, shivering.

And bumped into a shabby Zom man who turned sluggishly and mumbled, “John. John.”

The boy peered into the filmed eyes and slack mouth. Parchment skin stretched over stark promontories of the wrecked face. Memories stirred. Some faint echo in the cheekbones? The sharp nose?

“John … Father …”

“No!” John cried.

“John … came here … time …” The Zom reached unsteadily for the boy’s shoulder. It was in the tottering last stages of its second life, the black mysteries’ energy now seeping from it.

“You’re not my father! Get away.”

The Zom gaped, blinked, reached again.

“No!” John pushed the Zom hard and it went down. It made no attempt to catch itself and landed in a sprawl of limbs. It lay inert, filmed eyes peering at the hazy other side of the world.

“Hey, it botherin’ you?” Stan asked.

“Just, they just get to me, is all.”

John studied the slack-jawed face and resolved that this Zom could not possibly be his father. There was really no resemblance at all, now that he took a close and objective scrutiny.

“Let it lay there,” Stan said dismissively. “We got work to do.”

The rest of the unloading John helped carry out without once looking toward the crumpled form. Ladies stepped gingerly over the Zom and a passing man kicked it, all without provoking reaction.

The labor was fast and hard, for the induction ship was already taking on its passengers. By the time John returned from a nearby warehouse where the first wagonload went, only ripples in the mud-streaked river showed that the ship had tarried there at all.

That day was long and hard, what with plenty of barrels and hogsheads and wooden crates to unlash and sort out and stack in the crumbling stone warehouse. Stan was subagent for one of the big importation enterprises and had a steady run of jobs, so John was kept busy the rest of the day. The Zoms from the quay wore out quickly and Stan brought out another crew of them. John did not see the one that had collapsed and did not go looking for it in the musty rear of the warehouse where they were kept, either.

The laboring day ended as the big bare patch of worldwall overhead dimmed. This was a lucky occurrence, as people still preferred to sleep in darkness, and though there was no cycle of day and night here, a few hours of shadow were enough to set most into the slumber they needed. John had once seen a night that lasted several “days” so that folks began to openly speculate whether the illumination would ever return to the worldwall. When the sulphurous glow did return it waxed into stifling heat and piercing glare so ferocious that everyone regretted their earlier impatience for it.

Stan took John to his own boarding house and arranged for him, leaving just enough time for a bath of cold river water before supper. John was amazed at the boarding table to see the rapid-fire putting away of victuals combined with fast talking, as though mouths were meant to chew and blab at the same time. Game hens roasted to golden brown appeared on an immense platter and were seized and devoured before they reached him, though Stan somehow managed to get two and shared. A skinny man with a goatee opposite John cared only for the amusements of his mouth, alternately chewing, joking and spitting none too accurately into a brass spittoon set beside him. Stan ate only with his knife, nonchalantly inserting the blade sometimes all the way into his mouth. John managed to get forkfuls of gummy beans and thick slabs of gamy meat into himself before dessert came flying by, a concoction featuring an island of hard nuts in a sea of cream which burst into flame when a man touched his cigar to it. Stan ate one and then contentedly sat back in his wicker chair, picking his teeth with a shiny pocket knife, an exhibition of casual bravery unparalleled in John’s experience.

Afterward John wanted more than anything to sleep, but Stan enticed him into the hubbub streets. They ended up in a bar dominated for a time by an immense, well-lubricated woman whose tongue worked well in its socket, her eyes rolling as she sang a ballad John could not fathom. At the end of it she then fell with a crash to the floor and it took three men to carry her out. John could not decide whether this was part of the act or not, for it was more entertaining than the singing.

Stan thrust some dark beer upon him and artfully took that moment to pay John his day’s wages, which of course made John seem a piker if he did not buy the next round, which came with unaccountable speed. He was halfway through that mug and thinking better of this evening, of this huge complex city, of his fine new friend Stan, and generally of the entire world itself, when he recalled how his own father had said that in their family one discarded a cork once pulled from a bottle, knowing with assurance that it would not be needed again.

This connection troubled him, but Stan relieved John’s frown by stretching his legs out and sticking a sock-clad foot up. The sock had a face sewed on it so that Stan could jiggle his toes and make the face show anger, smile, even blink. All the while Stan carried on a funny conversation with the artistic foot. But this made John remember his first day at the orphanage, cold and bleak, when a tall boy had stuck his grey-socked foot from beneath some covers. John mistook it for a rat and threw his knife, skewering the foot. That had made him unpopular for some time around there.

He smiled at this and had another beer sip. Stan’s face went pale. John felt a presence behind him.

Turning, he saw a tall man dressed in leather jacket and black pants, sporting a jaunty blue cap. No one but pilots could wear such a cap with its gold flashings across the bill.

“Mr.—Mr. Preston,” Stan said.

“You gentlemen out for an evening? Not too busy to discuss business?”

Mr. Preston smiled with an austere good nature, as befitted a representative of the only unfettered and truly independent profession John knew. Lords found themselves hampered by parliaments, ministers knew the constraints of their parishioners, even schoolteachers in their awful power finally worked for towns.

But a silver river pilot knew no governance. A ship’s captain could give a half dozen or so orders as the induction motors readied and she backed sluggishly into the stream, but as soon as the engines engaged, the captain’s rule was overthrown. The pilot could then run the vessel exactly as he pleased, barking orders without consultation and beyond criticism by mere mortals.

Without asking, Mr. Preston yanked a chair from another of the raw hardwood tables which packed the bar, and smacked it down at the boys’ table. “I heard you come from uptime—way uptime,” he said to John.

“Uh, Stan told you?” John asked to get some time to think.

“He dropped a word, yes. Was he wrong?” Mr. Preston peered at John intently, his broad mouth tilted at an assessing angle beneath a bristly brown moustache.

“Nossir. Maybe he, uh, exaggerated, though.”

“Said you’d been above Rockport.”

“I caught sight of it in fog. That awful pearly kind that—”

“How far beyond?”

“Not much.”

“Cairo?”

“I … yeah, I gave it wide berth.”

“Describe it.”

“Big place, grander than this town.”

“You see the point? With the sand reef?”

“I didn’t see any reef.”

“Fair enough—there isn’t any reef. What’s the two-horned point like?”

“Foam whipping up in the air.”

“Where’s the foam go?”

“Shoots out of the river and arcs across to the other horn.”

“You go under the arc?”

“Nossir. I stayed in the easy water close on the other shore.”

“Smart. That arc’s been there since I was a boy and nobody’s lived who tried to shoot with the current under it.”

“I heard that too.”

“Who from?”

“Fellow upstream.”

“How far upstream?”

Nobody ever lied to a pilot, but you could shave the truth some. John took a sip of the dark beer that was thick enough to make a second supper—as some in the bar seemed to be doing, loudly—and said with care, “The reach above Cairo. That’s where I started.”

Mr. Preston leaned forward and jutted out his long jaw shrewdly. “There’s a big bar there, got to go by it easy. Sand, isn’t it?”

“Nossir, it’s black iron.”

Mr. Preston sat back and signaled the barkeep—who had been hovering, wringing a dirty rag—for a round. “Right. A plug of it that gushed up from some terrible event in the river bottom. Books say a geyser of molten metal—not the cool ones which flow under the river—that geyser came fuming up through the worldwall itself.”

“How can that be? What’s outside the world?”

“Not for us to know, son.”

“Please don’t call me son, sir.”

Mr. Preston’s bushy eyebrows crowded together, momentarily puzzled at the quick, hard note that had come into John’s voice, but then he waved his hand in an ample gesture and said, “Well, Mr. John, I am prepared to hire your services.”

Stan was looking bug-eyed at this interchange. For two lowly freight musclers to be drinking with a pilot was like a damp river rat going to dinner at the mayor’s. And this latest development—!

“Services?” Stan put in, unable to restrain himself any longer.

“Navigation. There’ve been five big time-squalls between here and Cairo since I was up that way. Now I got a commission to take the Natchez up that far and no sure way of knowing the river that far.”

“I’m not sure I know the river all that well,” John demurred, his mind still aswarm with scattershot thoughts.

“You see any of those storms?”

“Two of them, yessir. From a distance, though.”

“Only way to see one, I’d say,” Stan said with forced jocularity. He was still stunned from the offer.

The pilot grimaced in agreement, an expression that told much of narrow escapes and lost friends. “You kept your skiff well clear?”

“I poled and rowed, both. Prob’ly just lucky with the currents, truth to tell.”

“A time storm attracts ships according to their mass, see? Your rowing was most likely the cause of your salvation,” the pilot said. “An induction ship, despite its power, must be more crafty. Its weight is its doom.”

John sipped his strong beer and said, “I don’t know as I want to go back up there, sir.”

“I’ll make it worth your while.” The pilot squinted at him, as though trying to see something in John’s face that he wasn’t giving away. “I was hoping you might have business back up there.”

Might have business. At once the Zom’s face lurched into John’s mind’s-eye and he felt the barroom close about him, its suffocating air clotted with cigar smoke. The banks of blue fumes swirled amid the seeping yellow glow of filament bulbs which sprouted from the walls, each the size of a man’s head with his hat on. John had kept his mind away from the memory until now but the weight of uncertainty again descended. He could not know if the Zom was his father unless he found it again, questioned it.

“Sir, I’m going to have to give you my reply tomorrow. I have to see to a certain matter right now.”

The surprise in Stan’s and Mr. Preston’s faces was almost amusing. It increased when John stood, bootheels smacking the floorboards loudly from the drink he had put down. He nodded solemnly and without a word plunged into the darkness outside.

Inky shapes still shifted in his mind as he knocked on the door of Mr. Preston’s house. John still felt himself encased in the night.

It was a fitful morning, with grey light piercing a fog and sending traceries across the rooftops along the slumbering river. John could barely see the white picket fence framing Mr. Preston’s yard. The pearly wisps blotted out detail beyond the brick walk which led to the house. This was a grand place, he had to admit, even in such diffuse light. It was porticoed in pale pine, the massive columns topped with flowery capitals. He rapped the iron door knocker again and instantly the brass doorknob turned, as if attached to the knocker. A dwarf answered, a mute servant, and led John along a carpeted hall.

He was unprepared for the grandiosity of a pilot’s lodging, taking in with awe the mahogany furniture, a new electric lamp with yellow-paper shade, and an entire shelf of sound-sculptures. The dwarf retreated, gesturing at a yawning, tongueless mouth and showing the red servant tattoo on his shoulder to explain his silence.

A bounty of travel visions speckled the walls—Above the Falls of Abraham, Volcanic Quest, Heart of Lightness, Struggle Against Destiny—and many of literature, including the fanciful. John yearned to take the sheets and stroke them into luminosity, but as he reached for Time Stream and World-Wrack he heard heavy thumping footsteps and turned to find the pilot in full blue and gold uniform.

“I hope you have settled your other matter,” Mr. Preston said severely.

Only now did John recall clearly his abrupt departure of the night before. The town beyond that raucous room had swallowed memory. He had made his way through narrow streets lined by rude buildings that seemed to lean out over the street, eclipsing the wan sky glow. The moist lanes near the river had been tangled and impossible to navigate without stumbling and stepping on sprawled forms, like bundles of clothing left for trash collection.

The masters of the Zoms left them where they lay, sure that they could not move without further feeding. John took hours to find the slack-jawed face he had seen on the quay, and then another long time before he was sure that the Zom was not merely in its lapsed state of rest. The thing had proved dead, limbs akimbo, stiffening into a hardened parody of a dance.

At morning the burly owner had come by, shrugged at the corpse, and thrown it into his wagon for disposal. John’s questions about the Zom the big man brushed aside—he didn’t know the names, no, nor where they came from, nor from what part of the river they hailed. And the last glimpse John had of that face had unsettled him further, as if in final death the Zom gave its last secret. There was a clear resemblance to his father, though John’s memory from his early boyhood was shrouded by the rage, anguish and poverty of the intervening years.

So with fatigue in his bones but a fresh, iron resolve in his spine John made himself stand erect beside the oak mantelpiece and say to Mr. Preston, “I’ll come, sir.”

“Damn good! Here, you had breakfast?”

Cornmeal flapjacks and fritters, brought by the mistress of the house, quickly dominated John’s attention while the pilot regaled him with lore and stories. John managed to keep the details of his long voyage downriver well-muddied, and was distracted from this task by Mr. Preston’s collection of oddments, arrayed along the walls. There were crystals, odd-colored stones betraying volcanic abuse, a circlet of ancestral hair, five flint arrowheads from the fabled days, and some works of handicraft like dozens John had seen before. Beside these were bronze-framed, stiff images of addled-looking children, aged uncles and the like, all arranged awkwardly and in Sunday-suited best for their bout with immortality.

But these oddments were nothing compared with the large transparent cube that dominated the dining room table. It shed cold air and John took it to be ice, but as he ate he saw that no drops ran off the sleek flat sides. Within its blue-white glow small objects of art were suspended—a golden filigree, a jagged bit of quartz, two large insects with bristly feelers, and a miniature statue of a lovely young girl with red hair and a flowing white robe.

He had nearly finished inhaling the molasses-fattened flapjacks and slurping down a pot of coffee when he chanced to notice that one of the insect wings had lowered. Keeping an attentive ear to the pilot, who had launched into what appeared to be a four-volume oral autobiography in first draft, he watched and saw the girl spinning slowly about her right toe, the robe fetching up against her left leg and then gracefully playing out into a spinning disk of velvety delicacy.

By this time the insects had both flapped their transparent gossamer wings nearly through a quarter-stroke. They were both heading toward the girl. Their multifaceted eyes strobed and fidgeted with what to them must be an excited vigor, and to John was a torpid, ominous arabesque.

“Ah, the hunt,” the pilot interrupted his soliloquy. “Beautiful, eh? I’ve been watching it for long enough to grow three beards.”

“The girl, she’s alive.”

“Appears so. Though why she’s so small, I cannot say.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Far downstream.”

“I never saw such.”

“Nor I. Indeed, I suspect, from the quality of the workmanship, that the girl is real.”

“Real? But she’s no bigger than my thumbnail.”

“Some trick of the light makes her seem so to us, I reckon.”

“And these bugs—”

“They’re nearly her size, true. Maybe they’re enlarged, the opposite of the trick with the girl.”

“And if they aren’t?”

“Then when they reach the girl they will have a merry time.” The pilot grinned. “A week’s pay packet, I just handed it over flat, to purchase this. That li’l golden trinket, it’s revolving, too—see?”

Aghast, John felt a fresh wave of bitterly cold air waft from the cube of silent, slow time. He had an urge to smash the blue-white wedge of molasses-slow tempo, to release its wrenched epochs and imprisoning, collapsed perspectives. But this was the pilot’s object, and such men understood the twists of time better than anyone. Perhaps it was right that these things belonged to them.

Still, he felt relief when he escaped from the dining room and emerged into the cloaking fog outdoors.

They were to boom out of the dock that very day. John had never known such awe as that instilled by his first moment, when he marched up the gangplank and set foot upon the already thrumming deck.

Never before had he done more than gaze in reverence and abject self-abasement at one of the induction ships as it parted the river with its razor-sharp prow. Now Mr. Preston greeted him with a curt nod, quite circumspect compared to the sprawl of the man’s conversation at breakfast. With minor ceremony he received his employment papers. Other crew shook John’s hand with something better than the cool indifference he knew they gave any and all passengers. The customers who paid the costs were of course held in the lowest regard of all those aboard, including the wipe-boys below. John could tell from the somewhat distant, glassy gazes of the men and women of the crew that he was at least considered in the human family, pending.

“You been by that li’l flurry up ahead?” Mr. Preston asked him as they made their way up the three flights of external stairs to the pilot’s nest.

“Nossir. I came ashore, stowed my skiff and walked round it.”

“Ummm. Too bad. Think I’ll nudge out across stream, keep some distance on it.”

“Yessir.”

The loading was finishing, the ship’s barely restrained thirst for the river sending a strong strumming into the air. Freight spun off the wagons and flew aboard at the hands of jostling work gangs, mostly Zoms. Late passengers came dodging and scampering among the boxes and hogsheads awaiting loading. Wives carrying hat boxes and grocery knapsacks urged on sweaty husbands, who lugged carpetbags and yowling babies. Drays and baggage three-wheelers clattered over cobblestones and intersected each other’s trajectories more often than seemed possible from the supposed laws of probability, sending cases and jars smashing. Profanity blued the air. Windlasses snapped into hatches, fore and aft.

John loved the turmoil and racket, the whiz and whir of earnest purpose. The bursar called, “All not goin’, please to get themselfs ashore!” and last bells rang, and the thronged decks of the Natchez gushed their yammering burden onto the gangplanks—a running tide which a few last, late passengers fought. The stage-plank slid in and a tall man came running and tried to jump the distance. He got a purchase on the gunmetal side and a crewwoman hauled him up, but his back pocket opened and his wallet thunked into the river. The crowd ashore laughed and the woman had to stop the man from jumping in after it.

All this John watched from the elevated sanctity of the pilot’s nest. It was an elegant place, glass in so many directions he had to count to be sure there were only four of the transparent walls. The Cap’n stood beside the pilot, both arrayed in their dark blue-gold uniforms, and an eerie whistle sounded. The orange flag ran up the jack-staff and the ship ceased its drift. Momentum surged through the deck and oily smoke belched from the three tall chimneys at the ship’s midships.

The crowd along the quay called last-minute messages and cheered and the ship shot away from them, seeming to accelerate as it caught with induction fields the deep surge of metal beneath the waters. The town dwindled with bewildering speed, people on the quay turning into animated dolls that turned pinkish and mottled as John watched.

“The time flux,” Mr. Preston answered John’s frown. “I locked us onto her right off. We’re seeing their images squeezed and warped.”

Already the shore was dappled with reds and blues as time shifted and streamed about the ship, the slap and heave of currents resounding in deep bass notes that John felt through his big-heeled boots.

To fly across duration itself, to wrench away from the certainty of patient, single-minded time—John felt sour nausea grip his throat. Confusion swamped him as he felt their gut-deep accelerations—a quickening not in mere velocity but in the quantity which he knew governed the world but which no man could sense, the force of tangled space and time together. The firm deck went snake-slithery, thick air hummed and forked about him, the entire world took on a mottled complexion. His body fought for long, aching moments the urgent tows and tugs, his chest tight, bowels watery, knees feather-light—and then somehow his sinews found their equilibrium, without his conscious effort. He gulped in air and found it moist and savory.

“Steady.” Mr. Preston had been eyeing him, he now saw. “I reckoned you’d come through, but can’t be sure till it’s done.”

“What if I hadn’t?”

The pilot shrugged. “Put you ashore next stop, nothing else for it.”

“What about passengers?”

“It’s easier down below. Up here, the tides are worse.”

“Tides?” He studied the river’s expanse, which looked table-flat from here.

“Not river tides—time-tides. Passengers with addled heads and stomachs can just lie down till we reach their getoff point. Most, anyway.”

John had always figured that the job of a pilot was to keep his ship on the river, which was not a considerable feat, since it was so wide. Silently watching Mr. Preston trim and slip among the upwellings of rich brown mud, and then slide with liquid grace along a burnt-golden reef of bromium metal, he saw the dancer’s nimbleness and ease that came from the whirling oak-spoked master wheel, the orchestrated animal mutter of the induction motors, the geometric craft of rudder and prow. To have this elegant gavotte interrupted was not merely an inconvenience, and dangerous, but an aesthetic atrocity.

This John learned when a trading scow came rushing down the washboard-rough main current and into the Natchez’s path. Rather than perturb his elegant course, Mr. Preston ran across the scow’s two aft steering oars. Scarcely had the snapping and crunching ceased than a volley of gnarled profanity wafted up from the clutch of red faces shooting by to starboard. Mr. Preston’s face lit up with a positive joy, for here were fit targets who could, unlike the Natchez’s crew, talk back.

Joy of joys! He snatched open the roller window and stuck his head out and erupted back at the scow. And as the two ships separated and the scowmen’s maledictions grew fainter, Mr. Preston poured on both volume and ferocity, calling upon gods and acts John had never heard of. When Mr. Preston rolled the window shut on its spool the pilot was emptied of malice, all tensions of the departure now well fled.

“My, sir, that was a good one,” a voice said at John’s elbow. It was Stan, beaming with appreciation of the pungent profanity.

Not an opportune appearance. Mr. Preston skewered him with a glare. “Deckhands with opinions? Nose to the planking, you!”

So it was hours before John learned why Stan was on the Natchez at all, for Stan spent his time manicuring the already immaculate-looking pilot’s nest and then the iron stairs and pine gangways nearby. When John found him slurping a steaming cup of blackbean in the rear galley Stan waxed eloquent.

“Treasure, that’s why I signed on. Deckhand pays next to nothin’ and the time-current made me sick a sec or two, but I’m going to stick it out.”

“Uh, treasure?”

“I’m already looking for those hydrogen hats. Nobody never spied any this far downstream, so I figure you overshot, John, coming as far down as us. They got to be above us, for sure.”

John nodded and listened to Stan gush about the star sapphires and fat rubies awaiting them and barely avoided laughing and giving it all away. On the other hand, it had brought him a friend in a place he found daunting.

“Too bad you had to give up your quest, though,” Stan said slyly.

“What?” John was using a bowl of bluebeans to keep his mouth busy and was brought up short by this odd remark.

“You overshot another way. That Zom was who you wanted to find. Only you wanted the man in his first life, and that lies upstream.”

How Stan could swallow whole the hydrogen hat story and yet put together the truth about John’s father from little slivers was a confoundment. John acknowledged this with a grunt and a begrudging nod, but cut off further talk.

He had learned early in his downstreaming not to allow others to indulge in yet another sentimental tale of a poor boy without a mother’s love or a father’s strong arm, heaved all unfriended upon the cold charity of a censorious world. That was not the truth of it and if he did tell them true they drew back in white-eyed horror.

The river’s easy water lay close ashore. There the deep streams of bromium and mercury allowed the induction coils a firm grip, while the water current sped best in midstream. No vaporizing, hull-searing bromium streams broke surface here, so the watch was comparatively at ease.

Mr. Preston explained that the Natchez had to hug the bank, thus separating it from the downstreaming craft that lazed in the middle, harvesting the stiff current. John learned a few of the deft tricks for negotiating the points, bends, bars, islands and reaches which encumbered the route. He resolved early that if he ever became a pilot he would stick to downtiming and leave the uptiming to those dead to caution.

But the time storm afflicted both types of craft.

Murmuring dark fell as they cut across river before the whorl of time that awaited. It rose siphon-like at midriver, whereas reports as recent as yesterday back in town had said it clung to the shore opposite where the Natchez now picked its way.

“Moving quick, it is,” Mr. Preston said sternly at the wheel.

The whirling foam-white column dimpled and reddened the images of forest and plain above it. John stood to the corner of the pilot’s nest and soon exhausted everything he could remember about seeing the storm days before, which proved of no use, for the tempest had grown and shaped itself into a twisted figure-eight knot that spewed black water and grey-metal fountains.

Rain pelted the pilot’s-nest windows. The cyclone air sucked light from around them. Blue-black traceries made a fretwork above. Toward shore John saw the trees dim into spider-web outlines. Winds whipped and blasted at the Natchez, bending trees and turning up the pale underside of their leaves so that waves of color washed over the canopy. Trees tossed their arms as if in panic and with a shriek one of the Natchez’s chimneys wrenched and split and the top half flopped down on the foredeck. Crew ran out to cut it free and toss it overboard. John saw Stan with them, sawing frantically as the wind blasted them nearly off their feet. Peals of profanity blossomed on lips, so close John could read them, but a gust whipped the words away.

This was no ordinary wind. It ripped and cut the air, warping images so that men laboring seemed to go in agonizing slow motion, then frantic speed, all the while stretched and yanked and pounded out of shape by invisible forces.

Then—sssssttt!—a vacuum hiss jerked a brilliant glory-filled radiance into the sky. An ethereal glow flooded the deck. Yet ashore lay in gloom. Treetops plunged and wrestled with imaginary antagonists. At midriver foam spouted.

Another ssssstttt! and a crash and the ship fell a full man’s height, splashing itself into a bath of hot effervescence. In a fragment of a second the air got dark as sin and thunder rumbled across the sky like empty barrels rolling down stone stairs.

And then they were out, the gale was a scenic protuberance on a mild river again, and the pilot said, “Temporal turbulence was mild this go.”

It did not seem so to John but he sat on a stool and got his breathing in order again.

When he saw Stan later the young man said, surprised, “Twist? Stretched legs? I never felt any such,” and John understood that the shiftings and unsteadiness of both time and space were the province of an observer. But the truncated chimney, now being hastily restored by Stan and others in a full sweat, spoke of how real the waverings of time could be.

They cut across once more, skirting a big bar of aluminum that gleamed dully and could snatch the hull from an induction ship in a passing instant. This took the Natchez near the shore where John had left his skiff. With Mr. Preston’s binoculars he searched the blue-green brush but could find no trace of it.

“Somebody stole it,” he said, outraged.

“Or else ate it,” the pilot said, smiling.

“I didn’t grow that skiff, it’s not alive. I sawed and hammered it into being.”

“Maybe time ate it,” was all the pilot would say.

The shore seemed watery and indeterminate, a blue-green emulsion. As they beat their way upstream his respect for the pilot grew. No prominence would stick to its shape long enough for John to make up his mind what form it truly was. Hills dissolved as if they were butter mountains left on a dining room table during a warm Sunday afternoon.

Yet Mr. Preston somehow knew to make the Natchez waltz to starboard at some precise spot, else—he explained—the ship would have a grave misunderstanding with a snag that would rip them stem to stern in the time it took a man to yawn. The murky waste of water and slumbering metal laid traps for timeboaters of all keel depths.

Mr. Preston made her shave the head of an island where a small temporal vortex had just broken from the misty skin of the river, trimming it so close that trees banged and brushed the stern, nearly taking off a curious passenger—who hurriedly disembarked at their first stop, leaving his bag. He babbled something about haunted visions of headless women he had seen in the air. The crew guffawed and made faces. John joined them.

The vagaries of induction ships were of terrifying legend. Most folk who lived near the river—and many, indeed most, chose not to—reported seeing ships that winked into existence at a wharf, offloaded people and bags in a spilling hurry, and slipped away with motors whining, to vanish moments later by first narrowing, then becoming a door-thin wedge which sometimes rose up into the air before thinning into nothingness.

People who tried to keep pace with a ship felt a pressure like a massive unseen hand upon them. They tired, especially going upstream. Thus most lived within less than a day’s walk of where they had been born. By straining effort a strong man or woman could take foot or horse into a distant town to find a price for a fresh crop, say, or purchase goods. Most preferred to let the induction ships ply their trade up and down, hauling bales of finespun, say, and returning with store-bought wonders ordered from a gaudy catalog.

Some, though, booked passage on the ships, as much for the ride as for the destination. The Natchez’s main rooms were well appointed with opulent armchairs and stuffed davenports, the doorways garnished with bone-white wooden filigree of fanciful patterns and famous scenes of time-distortion. There was a technicolor symbolical mural of great pilots in the main lounge, and in first-class cabins a porcelain doorknob and a genuine full-wall image sheet which gave an artistic view when caressed. The public rooms featured curving ceilings touched up with elegant gilt, and rainshower-style chandeliers of glittering glass-drops. Day passengers could get down to shirt-sleeves and use a long row of bowls in the barber shop, which also boasted public towels, stiff public combs and fragrant public soap.

All this impressed John mightily. He had never, not even in the pilot’s own house, seen such opulence and finery. Passengers boarding from the small, straggling, shabby hamlets along shore echoed his wide-eyed reverence. Three days of cruising brought a certain bemused certitude to him, though, so that he gazed at these scruffy travelers in their baggy clothes with the same elevated scorn as the older crew.

Not that he inhabited the same celestial sphere as the pilot himself. Mr. Preston’s face wore lines earned by watching the immemorial clashes of differing temporal potentials. His speech veered from elegant, educated downriver cadences, to slurred, folk-wise vernacular. Pilots boated in eternity, and they knew it.

John was along for his passingly useful knowledge, not his skill. So when the induction coils froze up he hustled below on sharply barked command of the Cap’n, just as did Stan and the rest. Mr. Preston stayed aloft, of course.

The vast engine room was a frenzy of shouted orders and shoving bodies. The power that drove them uptime came separately from the huge copper armature, which spun, when working properly, between mammoth black iron magnets.

Normally, running into the river’s past would suck great gouts of energy from the whirling metal. But in cross-cutting the river, snaking through reefs and bromium upwellings, the pilot would sometimes end up running at crosscurrent to the normal, and they would move for a while upstream, as far as the normal water current was concerned, but downstream and thus downtime, as the temporal contortions saw it.

There was no general sign of this, though John thought he glimpsed far out in the river a huge, ghostly ship that flickered into being for a mere shaved second. It had great fat towers belching grimy smoke, portholes brimming with violet light. A craft hovered in the air like a gargantuan insect, vanes churning the mist above, as if it were a swollen predator mosquito about to attack a metal whale.

Then—ssstttpp!—wind had whistled where the vision had floated, and a cry from below announced an all-hands.

Stan showed him the coated pipes and cables, already crusted a hand deep in hard, milk-white ice. Boilers nearby radiated intense heat into the room, but the time-coursing inside the pipes and cables sucked energy from them so quickly that the ice did not melt.

John and all other crew members fell to chipping and prying and hammering at the ice. It was solid stuff. A chunk fell off into John’s hand and he momentarily saw the surface of a pipe that led directly into the interior of the induction motors. Though normally shiny copper, now the pipe was eerily black.

He stuck his nose in close to see and heard the crack of air itself freezing to the metal.

“Hey, get back!” a crewwoman shouted, yanking him away just as the entire gap he had opened snapped shut abruptly—air whooshing into the vacuum created, then freezing instantly itself, in turn sucking in more air.

Another man was not so fortunate, and froze three fingers rock-solid in a momentary crevice in the pipe ice. His cries scarcely turned a head as they all labored to break off and heat away the fast-growing white burden.

A cable sagged under its accumulating weight and snapped free. The high whine of electrical power waned when it did, and John felt real fear.

He had heard the tales of induction ships frozen full up this way, the infinite cold of inverse time sucking heat, life, air and self from them. The victim ships were found, temporally displaced years and miles from their presumed location, perpetual ivory icebergs adrift on the seemingly placid river.

John hacked and pried and at last sledge-hammered the ice. The frost groaned and shrugged and creaked as it swelled, like some living thing moaning with growing pains.

Across the engine room he heard another cry as a woman got her ankle caught by the snatching ice. Gales shrieked in to replace the condensing air. Voices of the crew rose in panic.

And the Cap’n’s bellow rang above it all, giving orders—“Belay that! Lever it out, man, heave on that crowbar! Thomson, run there quick! Smash it, son!”

—and abruptly the howling winds faded, the ice ceased surging.

“Ah,” the Cap’n sighed, “at last the pilot has deigned to direct us properly.”

John took some offense at this, for no pilot ever could read the true vector of the time-current flux. Mr. Preston had brought them out of it, which should be fair enough.

There were awful tales of ships truly mispiloted. Of induction craft hurtling uptime out of control—solid iceberg ships, with deep-frozen crew screaming upstream toward the beginning of time. Of downriver runaways, white-hot streaks that exploded long before they could reach the legendary waterfall at the end of eternity.

But the Cap’n reflected on none of that. John learned then that the high station of a pilot implies harsh criticism at the slightest hint of imperfection.

Casks and barrels and hogsheads blocked the quay but could not conceal from the pilot’s nest the sprawling green beauty of the city.

Even the blocks of commercial warehousing sprouted verdant and spring-fresh from the soil. Cairo had perfected the fast-spreading art of growing itself from its own rich loam. This art was much easier than planting and raising trees, only to chop them down, slice them with band saws, plane them out and fashion them elaborately into planks, beams, joists, braces, girders, struts and dowels, all to make shelter.

Such easeful grace demanded a deep sort of knowing, of course. The folk of Cairo fathomed the double-twisted heart of living things.

The Natchez rang three bells as it docked. Uprivermen often had a woman in every port and the bells announced which Cap’n this was, so that the correct lady could come to welcome him—sometimes for only an hour or two layover, in his cabin, before departure for the next port uptime. The vagaries and moods of the time currents led to many a hasty assignation. But the Cap’n might enjoy another such succulent dalliance quite soon—if he were physically able.

A red-faced lady brushed by John on the gangplank as he went ashore. He gave her no notice as he contemplated the overnight here in the river’s biggest city.

His head was crammed with lore he had learned in the pilot’s nest, knowing that his challenge came next. At once he went to Cairo city hall and consulted the log of citizens. There was no notation concerning his father, but then it had been a forlorn hope anyway. His father was never one to let a piece of paper tag along behind like a dog, only to bite him later. John swallowed the disappointment and let his long-simmering anger supply him with fresh energy.

Stan caught up to him and together they patrolled the streets, Stan doing the talking and John striding with hands in pockets, bewitched by the sights.

The self-grown houses rose seamlessly from fruitful soil. Seed-crafters advertised with gaudy signs, some the new neon-piping sort which spelled out whole words in garish, jumpy brilliance—Skillgrower, Houseraiser, even Custom Homeblossoms.

They wandered through raucous bars, high-arched malls, viny factory-circles, and found them smoothly, effortlessly elegant, their atmospheres moist with fragrances which issued from their satiny woods. Women worked looms which grew directly from the damp earth. Stan asked one of these laboring ladies why they could not simply grow their clothes straight on the bush, and she laughed, replying, “Fashion changes much too quick for that, sir!” and then smothered a giggle at Stan’s misshapen trousers and sagging jacket.

This put Stan of a mind to carouse, and soon John found himself strolling through a dimly lit street which reeked of, as Stan put it, “used beer.”

The women who lounged in the doorways here were slatternly in their scarlet bodices and jet-black, ribbed corsets. John felt his face flush and recalled a time long ago, in the county school he had been forced to attend. They had made fun of him there simply because he was from the orphanage. The boys’ athletic coach had given them all a sheet of special paper and a pen that wrote invisibly, with orders to draw a circle for each time they masturbated—“shaking hands with your best friend,” he called it. The invisibility was to preclude discovery and embarrassment.

At the end of a month they had all brought the sheets in. The coach had hung them up in rows and darkened the classroom, then turned on a special lamp. Its violet glow revealed the circles, ranks upon ranks of them, to the suddenly silent boys. “This,” the coach had said, “is the way God sees you. Your inner life.”

The aim of all this displayed sin was to get the boys to cut down on their frequency, for lonely Onan’s dissipation sapped the intellectual skills—or so the theory went. Instead, it led to endless boasting, after they had returned to daylight and each knew his own circle-count, and yet could claim the highest number present, which was one hundred and seven.

John had attained a mere eighty-six, somewhat cowed by the exercise itself, and felt that had he known the end in mind, could have pushed himself over a hundred, easy.

Now in Cairo, with women available for the first time in his life, he had every confidence in his ability, and only a fidgety tautness, but the women beckoning with lacquered leers and painted fingers and arched blue eyebrows somehow did not appeal. He felt that to do this here, while deeper matters troubled his mind, was not right. Stan made some fun of him for this and John reacted with surly swear-words, most fresh-learned from Mr. Preston.

Anger irked his stomach. He left Stan bargaining with a milk-skinned woman who advertised with red hair and hips that seemed as wide as the river, and made his way at random through the darkling city.

Labyrinths of inky geometry enclosed him. Passing conversations came to him muffled and softly discordant as he worked his way among the large commercial buildings near the docks. Here the jobbing trade waxed strong, together with foundries, machine shops, oil presses, flax mills and towering elevators for diverse crops, all springing from the intricately tailored lifecrafts known best in Cairo.

Not that such arts grew no blemishes. Slick yellow fungus coated the cobbled streets, slippery malignancies that sucked at John’s heels, yearning to digest him. Trough-like gutters were awash in fetid fluids, some stagnant and brown-scummed, others running fast and as high as the thick curbstones.

Each building had a mighty cask, several stories high, grown out from the building itself and shooting stilt-roots down to support the great weight of rainwater it held. Never near the river was there enough topsoil to support wells. The passing veils of rain were all Cairo had, and as if to make this point, droplets began to form in the mist overhead and spatter John as he searched.

He descended into a lowland zone of the city, where the streets lay silent, with an empty Sunday aspect. But the wrought-iron symbology on the ramshackle buildings here told the reason. They made heavy, rugged ciphers and monograms, filled in with delicate cobwebs of baffling, intricate weave. John could make out in the gathering gloom the signs of Zom businesses, bearing the skulls and ribbed ornamentation.

It would be just his bad luck, of course, that the worldwall glow would ebb at just this time. The rain dribbled away, leaving a dank cold. He looked upward and saw that far overhead was a broad island of sandy waste, interrupting the worldwall, and so leaving this part of the city permanently darker. So they had decided to put the Zom industry here, in constant gloom.

He peed against a building, reasoning that it would help it to grow just like any plant, though he did modestly slip down a side alley to do it. So John was off the street when a squad of Zom women came by.

They shambled, chill-racked and yellow-faced, eyes playing about as if in addled wonder, and one saw John. She grinned, an awful rictus, and licked her lips and hoisted her skirt with one hand, gesturing with the other index finger, eyebrows raised. John was so transfixed he stopped urinating and stood there shock-still until finally the Zom shrugged and went on with the other miserables. His heart restarted again some time after and he put himself back in his pants.

Zoms were accepted as a necessity for their brute labor, he told himself, but still his breath came short, his chest grew tight and fluttery. Instinctively he reached up into the mellow, soft air and whispered his ritual words.

A long moment of nothing. Then he felt the reassuring grasp of an unseen hand clasping his own, shaking it firmly in reassurance. It was a callused workingman’s hand, world-worn. He had felt it in moments of vexation since he was a young boy, since the day his father had left in blood and fire and his world had ended.

It had started that night. Somehow he had known that the spirit realm would understand that flame and hot fury, and so had simply reached up into the prickly spark-filled air of the burning house and had felt the firm fist that, sensing him, opened into a welcoming palm.

Years later, in another crisis, he had looked up to see what grasped him, and the hand was invisible, though he could feel it. But the air waxed gossamer-rich with crystalline motes—a manifestation, certainly. More sure than demons or mana.

The spirit hand gave him strength. Made freshly bold, he walked down a street of wavering oil lamps and searched out the Zom raiser.

The man was tall, in a stovepipe-thin charcoal suit. He sat in a spacious room, working at an ancient stone desk, scribbling on parchment. Along the walls were deep alcoves sunk into shadow.

“I’m looking for a, my father. I thought maybe—”

“Yes yes,” the man said. “An old story. Go ahead, look.”

This abruptness startled John so that it was some moments before he fully realized what he saw.

Grimy oil lamps cast dim yellow radiance across long rows of slanted boards, all bearing adult corpses. They were not shrouded, but wore work clothes, some mud-caked. John walked down the rows and peered into bloodless, rigid faces. In the alcoves were babes laid out in white shrouds.

All had the necessary ribbed ironwork cage about them. Pale revitalizing fluids coursed through tubes into their nostrils, pumped by separate hearts—bulbous, scarlet muscles attached at the ribs, pulsing. The fluids did their sluggish work down through the body, sending torpid waves washing from the sighing chest through the thick guts and into the trembling legs. Their charge expended, the fluids emerged a deep green from the rumps, and spilled into narrow troughs cut into the hardwood floor.

Amid echoing drips and splashes he returned to the stone desk, an island of luminosity in the cool, clammy silence. “He’s not here.”

“Not surprising. We move them on fast.” The man’s deep-sunken eyes gave nothing away.

“You raised anybody looks like me?”

“Got a name for him?”

John gave it. The sound of his father’s name spoken full was itself enough to put John’s teeth to grinding. The man studied a leather-bound ledger and said, “No, not in the records. Say, though, I recall something …”

John seized the Zom raiser by the shoulders. “What?”

“Leggo. Leggo, I say.” He shied back and when John’s hands left him he straightened himself the way a chicken shakes its feathers into order. “You damn fools come barging in here, you’re always—”

“Tell me.”

Something in John’s voice made the man cease and study him for a long moment. “I was trying to recollect. You’re all wrong, lookin’ on the slabs for him. That name, it’s in the trade somehow.”

“Zom business?”

“Believe so. A supplier, if I ’member right.”

John felt his throat tighten with memories. His father had worked now and then, always at jobs he picked up easily and let go of just the same. And always work that strayed to the shadowy side. “That would be right.”

“He comes in here with a squad or so, every week or so.”

“From where?”

“Gets them in the countryside, he says.”

“That would fit.”

The man picked up his quill pen and used it to turn the pages in a small volume of notes. John saw that he had only one arm. “Yeah, here. Zom master, license and all. You can see what he’s rounded up lately, if you like,” the man said without looking up.

“I can? How?”

“He’s got a place where he holds them till he’s got a goodly number. Then he brings them here for kindling up to strength.”

“Where?”

“Last I heard, ’bout seven blocks over.”

“Which way?”

“Annunciation and Poydras. Big long shed, tin roof.”

John made his way through the rain-slicked streets, getting lost twice in his hurried confusion and slipping on something slimy he did not want to look at. He got to the low building as a figure came out the other end of it and something made him step back into the street and watch the man hurry away. He went inside and there was nobody there except five Zoms who lay on ready-racks, chilled down and with brass amulets covering their faces. A gathering sense of betrayal caught in his mouth and John trotted down the empty aisles where Zoms would labor in the day, the slanting grey light making every object ghostly and threatening.

He knew before he reached the end of it that the Zom raiser had played him for a fool all along, had maybe even recognized him somehow. While John was finding his way here the man had somehow sent word and now his father had slipped away.

He was not smarter, John reminded himself, but he was younger. He ran hard for some minutes through shrouded streets and caught a glimpse of the same figure—running hard now, too, coat fluttering behind—as he came up into the open produce market.

The stalls yawned empty and the man ahead darted among them, knowing better where he was going and gaining distance. John settled in to run him down but then they burst out onto Galvez Street and up it onto the ample docks. The man was going flat out. He ran down stone steps to the riverside and leaped into a launch moored there. It was an oddly shaped craft and the man worked frantically to start it.

John could hear the engines sputter and then rumble as he put on a desperate surge, but the launch erupted away from the dock before he could reach the stairs.

It sped off upriver, growling, and John saw with a souring taste in his mouth what the vessel carried amidships, giving it the strange shape: induction coils.

The man did not look back.

Three deep, mellow bell notes floated off across the sublime skin of the river and some moments later came wafting back, steepened into treble and shortened in duration.

“Means we’re getting close to the arc,” Mr. Preston said.

John narrowed his eyes, searching the gloom before them. “Can’t see a thing.”

“The bell notes get scrunched up by the time-wind, then bounced back to us. Better guide than seeing the arcs, sometimes. They twist the light, give you spaghetti pictures.”

John would have preferred to watch the treacherous standing curves of frothy water, for he had seen one smash a flatboat to splinters on his trip down. A deep hush brooded upon the river. He felt a haunting sense of isolation, remoteness from the bustle of Cairo, though they were only hours beating upstream from it.

To starboard he could make out solid walls of dusky forest softening into somber grey. Mr. Preston sounded the bells again and the steepened echoes came, quicker and sharper this time.

Then the river seemed to open itself, revealing first the foaming feet and then the marvelous high swoop of the arcs. Silently they churned at their feet, sending waves to announce their power. Yet as the Natchez came up, holding tight to the opposite shore, the water was glass-smooth, with mercury breaking at midriver and sending spectral flags of glittering mist into an eerily still air.

This tranquility fractured. A wall of thunder shook the glass windows of the pilot’s nest.

“Whoa!” Mr. Preston called and slammed on the power. The induction motors sent a shock through the decking.

“It look the way you seen it last?” Mr. Preston never took his eyes from the arcs, which were shimmering pink and blue now.

“Yessir, only the tall one, it had a bigger foot.”

“You shoot down through here?”

“Nossir, stayed out by that sandbar.”

“Damn right you were, too.”

John had, in the chop and splash of it, been given no choice whatever, but he said nothing, just held on. The deck bucked, popped, complained.

“Eddy running here up the bank to past the point,” Mr. Preston said, betraying some excitement despite himself. “Might get us through without we have to comb our hair afterward.”

They went flying up the shore so close that twigs snapped off on the chimneys. Mist churned the air fever-pink and drumroll bass notes came up through John’s boots. “Hold on for the surge!” Mr. Preston called, as if anyone wasn’t already, and it hit.

The Natchez struck the vortex whorl plunging by near the point. It stretched clear across the river this time, an enormous mouth of mercury and bromium seething brown and silver together in smeared curves. The ship whirled around, John thought as his stomach lurched, like a favorite top his mother had given him, possessing the mysterious ability to stand so long as it spun.

This abstract memory lasted one breath and then water crashed over the pilot’s nest and smashed in the aft window. The ship careened to port. Time-torques whipsawed the groaning timbers. An eddy seized her and crunched one of her chimneys into pathetic torn tin. Concussion clapped both John’s ears and left his head ringing. Lightning-quick flashes of ruby radiance forked from the river and ran caressing over the upper decks. Shouts. Screams.

Athwart the current, then with it, the Natchez shot free of the howling whorl. Within a mere moment they brought up hard in the woods at the next bend. Ordinarily this would have been an embarrassment for a pilot, but as it came from passing uptime against the arcs, it was a deliverance, a penalty, like a stingy tip left after a banquet.

In the lapsed quiet afterward they drummed upstream and John watched the shoreline for signs he remembered, but mostly to find the launch carrying the dark-clothed figure.

He did not tell anyone that, but Mr. Preston gave him sidewise study-filled glances now and then. Stan, after the obligatory ragging of John for having shied away from the women of easy virtue, kept pestering him about finding hydrogen hats. So John spent long hours pretending, watching beady-eyed the dense, uncut forest roll by.

To him the richness here was vaster than downriver, thicker and mysterious beyond ready expression. He had not the wit nor especially the years to savor it fully; taste comes with age and is perhaps its only reward, though some call the same thing wisdom.

He saw the great slow-working chains of cause and effect on the river—forces which, though elusive in the redolent natural wealth, in hard fact underpinned all the sweeping vistas, the realms of aery compass, and infinitesimal machineries of wood and leaf. The young must make their way in a world which is an enormous puzzle, so he watched the shifting hues quick-eyed, a student of the forever fluid, knowing that the silver river might foam suddenly to suck him under or contrariwise spew him aloft in a frothy geyser—all beautiful events, he supposed, but they would leave him no less dead.

John kept lively advising Mr. Preston on reefs and bars. He inspected the passing acres of lumber rafts, great pale platforms behind which the launch could conceal itself. Likewise each bulky barge and the trading scows which peddled from farm to farm, the peddler’s family hanging out washing on deck and kids calling hullos. So when Stan shouted up from the passenger deck, “See that! Must be! Must be!” John felt a spur of irritation at being distracted from his work.

Stan scampered aft and poled aboard some floating debris, then had the temerity to carry it forward to the pilot’s nest.

Mr. Preston scowled and looked to bite his moustache at the sight of a mere deckhand intruding, but before John could shoo Stan out he saw the flower-like grey thing Stan carried.

“It’s a hat! A positive hat,” Stan burbled. “Pure hydrogen—worth plenty on its own, wager me—and lookee here.”

Stan proudly displayed brooches and pins mounted into the gunmetal-grey thing, which to John’s immense surprise surely did resemble a hat. It was nearly weightless yet hard and the jewels gleamed with inner radiance.

“And you led me straight on it, too, John, I’ll not forget,” Stan said. “I’ll share out the proceeds, yessir.”

“Uh, sure thing.”

Mr. Preston’s stormy face had turned mild as he studied the hat. “Never seen anything like this. How far upriver you say you come from?” He peered at John.

“Good bit further,” was all John could say, for indeed that was so, but the shore already looked odd and contorted to him, as though his memory was warping.

That was nothing compared to the consternation he felt but could not give a hint of, for the hat story was total yarning—yet here was an actual, in-fact bejeweled hydrogen hat, worth many a month’s pay.

His befuddlement got swept away soon enough by the twisty demands of the river. Under Mr. Preston he was coming to see that the face of the wedded water and metal was a wondrous book, one in a language dead to him before but now speaking cherished secrets. Every fresh point they rounded told a new tale. No page was empty. A passenger might be charmed by a churning dimple on its skin, but to a true riverman that was an italicized shout, announcing a wreak or reef of wrenching space-time vortex about to break through from the undercrust of worldwall.

Passengers went ooh and aahhh at the pretty pictures the silver river painted for them without reading a single word of the dark text it truly was. A lone log floating across the prow could be in truth a jack-jawed beast bent on dining upon the tasty wooden hull. A set of boiling, standing rings spoke of a whorl which could eat an entire induction disk.

Mr. Preston would sometimes muse out loud as they rounded a point and beheld a fresh vista, “That slanting brown mark—what you make of that? I’d say a bar of ground-up metal, dissolving now in the bromine current. See that slick place? Shoaling up now, be worse when we head back down. River’s fishing for induction ships right there, you mark.”

But mostly Mr. Preston asked John the questions, for the river perpetually tore itself down, danced over its own banks, made merry of memory. They saw a farmer had shoved down pilings to hold his ground, even set a crazy-rail fence atop it, only to have the blithe momentum strip and pry and overrun his fetters, break his handcuffs, and laugh as the lawless currents—seeming enraged by this confinement—stripped his worldly dominion.

Mr. Preston brought aboard a local “memory man” to help them through a set of neck-twisting oscillations, and the fellow displayed the affliction John had heard of but never witnessed. To remember everything meant that all events were of the same size.

The short, swarthy man sat in the pilot’s nest and guided them well enough through the first two swaybacks, with reefs and snags galore, but on the third began to tell the history of the snaggle-toothed tree that had fallen in at the lee shore and so stopped them from using the close-pass there, and from that tree went on to the famous boiling summer which had scorched the tree, and from the summer to a minute rendition of the efforts of Farmer Finn, who had saved his crops by building a sluice-diverter of the river, to Finn’s wife who run off with a preacher, only people then found out he was no preacher at all but in fact a felon escaped from some jail uptime, which suggested to the memory man the way laws had to be deformed here to accord with the passage back and forth in time of relatives and wives and husbands, which brought forth the scandal of the lady in a red dress who had taken on all the men at a dance once, hiking her skirts for each in turn plain as day, outside against the wall, and from there it was but a step to the intricate discussion of dance steps the memory man had learned (since he learned anything merely by seeing it once), complete with demonstrations, so that Mr. Preston had to yank the man’s attention back to the veering river before it gutted them on an aluminum reef.

Within minutes, though, the memory man would drift into more tedious jaw about whatever strayed into view of his panoramic mind. Mr. Preston bore this for the swings and sways of those bends, and then put the memory man ashore with full pay. The man didn’t seem to mind, and left still maundering on about great accidents of the past and where their survivors lived now and how they were doing.

John silently envied the man, though, for at least he did know exactly that one short portion of the river, whereas John’s own memory betrayed him at each new rounding. Islands and bars arose from the water where none had been before, his mind told him. The river ran in new side-channels and had seemingly cut across headlands to forge fresh entries, thrusting aside monumental hillsides and carving away whatever misunderstandings had arisen with the spongy, pliant forest.

“This sure looks to be a horseshoe curve here. Remember it?” Mr. Preston would ask, and John would peer through the misty wreaths which often wrapped the river, and shake his head.

On this particular one they hauled ashore, because a passenger thought he lived near here, though could not spot any landmark either, but wanted to try his own luck. John went ashore and slogged through brambles and sandy loam across the neck of the horseshoe, arriving well before the Natchez got there, coming hard-chuffing around the curve.

These branches and inlets lay in his past, yet despite their here-and-now solidity they had wriggled into new shapes, oddities of growth, even whole fresh porticoed master-houses. Slowly it dawned on John that none of this surprised Mr. Preston.

“Every time we go upriver, things lay different,” Mr. Preston said, twirling a toothpick in his mouth as his only sign of agitation.

“Damnfire,” John said, a new curse he had picked up and was proud to sport. “What use is a memory man, then?”

“Better than nothing, is all.”

They were near to drawing all the water there was in the channel, a curious tide having sucked streamers up and into the clouds above. The hull caught and broke free and then snagged again, so Mr. Preston had to order the induction motors up to full, wrenching them off the worldwall bed of the river by sheer magnetic ferocity.

“Sure seems that way,” John said. “Why’d you hire me as guide, then?”

“Your knowledge is for certain fresher than any I could find. And you’re young enough, you don’t think you know everything.”

They were going slow, deck humming, riding on magnetic cushions that John thought of as bunched steel coils. Mr. Preston said that wasn’t far wrong, only you couldn’t feel or see the wires. They were more like the wrestling ghosts of spirit-world steel, he said.

“Sometimes a time-tide will come and cut a little gutter across a neck of land,” Mr. Preston went on. “I saw one once while I was shipping downstream, no bigger than a garden path it was. Shimmered and snaked and snapped yellow fire. Now, there were handsome properties along that shore. But inland from there was a worthless old farm. When I came back uptime on the old Reuben, that li’l time-twist had cut a big course through. Diverted the whole damn river, it did. Shooting off crimson sparklers, still. That old farm was now smack on the river, prime land, worth ten times more. The big places that had been on the river stood inland. No ship could reach them.”

“Lucky,” John said.

Mr. Preston grinned. “Was it? Lot of people got mad, accused the family that owned the old farm of starting that time-wrinkle.”

“How could they?”

“Who’s to say? Is there a way to figure it? The past is labyrinth, truly. Give time a shove here, a tuck there? Anybody who knows how, sure don’t talk about it.”

But John felt himself lost in a dense, impenetrable maze of riverways. Coming upstream against the time-pressure now refracted the very air.

Smooth and serene the majestic mud-streaked expanse had seemed as he drifted down obliviously in his skiff. Now the shore was morasses and canebrakes and even whole big plantations, the grand main houses beautiful in their ivory columns. He often gazed up at the world hanging overhead, lands of hazy mystery. A ripple passed, flexing the entire worldwall, and John felt suddenly that they all lived in the entrails of a great beast, an unknowable thing that visited the most awful of calamities upon mere humans by merely easing its bowels.

The whorl came upon them without warning. It burst through a channel of bromium, coiling like a blue-green serpent up into the shimmering air. A thunderclap banged into the pilot’s nest and blew in two windows.

John saw it from the middeck where he was helping Stan and two men with some baling. The glass scroll window shattered but did not catch Mr. Preston in the face, so when John raced in the pilot was already bringing the Natchez about, clawing away from the swelling cloud-wrack.

The whorl soared, streamers breaking from it to split the sky with yellow forked lightning. John saw it hesitate at its high point, as if deciding whether to plunge on across the world itself and bury itself in the forest-wall hanging far overhead. Then it shook itself, vigorous with the strength of the newborn, and shot riverward.

The silver river seemed to yearn for this consummation, for it buoyed in up-sucking ardor and kissed the descending column. Instantly a foam of muddy water and a mist of metal soared through the time-whorl, writing a great inverted U that bubbled and frothed and steam-hissed amid more sharp thunder-cracks.

“Damn!” Mr. Preston cried. “That’ll block us for sure.”

John held tight to a stanchion. “Can’t we shoot by—”

“It’ll rip-tide us to pieces, we try that.”

A blistering gale broke over the Natchez. “You figure it’ll last long?”

“This big a one, you bet.”

The Natchez beat steadily away from the whorl, which twisted and shuffled its water-feet around on the skin of the river. Mud and logs sucked up into it tumbled and seemed to break apart and come together again. In the midst of what looked like a water-wave John saw a log burst into orange flame. It turned in slow motion, streaming black smoke, and smacked full into the river.

Then he saw the launch. It had been across the river, probably hiding among some weeping willows. It broke out of there as the whorl lashed sidewise and John saw a dark figure at the helm. “Wait! Let’s stay awhile, see if it—”

“Shut up, boy. We’re running downtime.”

Even the Cap’n could not overrule a pilot reversing course for safety. John stood frozen as the launch cut cross-river. Then he did not think any more but simply ran, down the iron stairs and pine gangway and then was in the water, flailing about him for a desperate moment and then striking for shore. Stan shouted behind him but he did not look around. The shore was pretty close and it lay near where the launch would end up, he estimated. But then he heard a whooshing boom, like a giant drawing its breath, and a funnel mouth of the whorl came skating on the choppy silver waters. It swooped with trainwreck malevolence down upon the Natchez and drew it up, elongating the decks like rubber stretched to its limit and then cracking—fracturing time with a rolling boom. A deckhand jumped overboard and his body stretched to translucent thinness.

The Natchez squeezed and contorted and obeyed the call of warping forces. It shot up the whorl-mouth. Time-tides wrenched and wracked it and then it was gone in a brilliant last pearly flash. The glare burned John’s face.

John had no time to think or mourn. The mouth reeled, crackled and snaked and swept down upon him. He had time to gulp in air. Burning orange foam broke over him. Legs, arms—both stretched involuntarily, as though some God were playing with his strings—yet he was weightless. He knew he must be rising up the whorl but he felt a sickened, belly-opening vacancy of infinite falling. He struggled not to fill his lungs as the foam thronged at his skin, infested his nose, pried at his eyelids. Don’t breathe! was all he could think as he prepared for the time-crushed impact his instincts told him was coming at the end of such a protracted fall.

He smacked hard. Bobbed to the surface. Paddled, gasping. Ignored the wave-wracked waters. Made the shore and flopped upon it.

He found the launch upstream, backed into a copse. It was hidden just the way he had done with his skiff and he smiled without humor.

A sweet dust of time blew high above the river and there was no sign of the whorl. Or of the Natchez.

John followed the boot tracks away from the launch. They led inland, so there was no time pressure to fight. His clothes dried out as he walked beneath a shimmering patch of burnt-gold worldwall that hung tantalizingly behind roiling clouds.

Inland the lush forest dribbled away into scrub desert. He realized his father might back around on him so he retraced his steps and erased signs of his passage from the water and onto safe stone. He avoided vegetation where possible and slid through bushes so that stems bent but did not break. This was crucial, for a broken stem cannot be fixed without careful cutting and even so, a sure reader of signs would catch it. Leaving stems or branches pointing the way you came was bad, too. They had to be gently urged back to a random pattern. He mussed up a scraped bush and tree so that it looked to be from an animal, from biting or itch-easing. Stealth spelled safety.

His head pounded with a mysterious headache that worked its way into his eyes. So much had happened but he put it aside, not thinking about Mr. Preston or Stan, just keeping on. It got dryer and a big-winged thing with teeth flapped overhead, eyeing him for possibilities. He flung a rock at it.

He wished for a blunderbuss tree, recalling the man who had threatened him with one of the awkward weapons. But a big fallen branch served to make a club after he stripped the bark away.

The boot tracks were steady, no heels dug in from haste. He had grown up well above here but knew the manner of empty spaces better than the rich riverland and so let his senses float out ahead of him. Once he reached up and the hand was there, shaking his with calm certainty.

Everything in the land fled from his footsteps. Lizards scattered into the nearest cracked rock. Four-winged quail hovered in shadow, hoping you’d take them for stones, but at the last moment they lost their nerve and burst into frantically flapping birds. Snakes evaporated, doves squeaked skyward, rabbits crazylegged away in a dead heat. Fox, midget mountain horn, coyote—they melted into legend, leaving only tracks and dung. The heart of the desert was pale sand, a field whose emptiness exposed life here for what it was: conjured out of nothingness, bound for it, too. Desert plants existed as exiles from each other, hoarding their circles of water collection done silently beneath the sand by single-minded roots. Vacancy was life. He had learned to think that way since his father left the burning house.

He caught a smell fetid and pestiferous and knew instantly that his father would be drawn to it. An upwelling—he worked his way around it by nose alone. But when he looked down into the bowl-like field he could see only sprawled dead. Cautiously he ventured out. Men in armor lay putrefying, faces puffed and lips bruised. Most were gutted, appearing to give birth to their own entrails.

The time-whorls sometimes did this, disgorging people or matter from times and places no one knew. What the induction ships did by laboring upstream a flick of space-time could accomplish in an instant. Sometimes carrion like this could still be saved for the Zom business.

John turned to merge again with the brush and there he was.

The face—angular, hollow-eyed, a familiar cut to the jawline and the downcurved mouth. John compared it with the last sharp image, the portrait framed in conflagration and carried now for a dozen immemorial years in his mind, taken out and studied every day. Yes. He was sure. The father.

“What do you want?” The voice was low and edged.

“Justice.”

“Who are you?” The eyes showed skittering fear.

“You know me.”

“In these places? Don’t know what I know anymore. Nothing’s regular. You’ve run me far uptime. Blew out the i-boat. Dunno what the hell this place even is. I—”

“You fled the house.”

“What?” The face constricted as though wolfdark memories pressed against it. Then it relaxed. “Damnfire! You’re talking that far back?”

“You know I am. She died in there.”

A long silence. The man studied him as if looking for an edge, some advantage. Or was there some recognition? “Yes. Yes. All past now though. Listen, the family was finished.”

“It will be when this is done.”

The man squinted as clouds above parted and golden glare descended. John sensed his uncertainty and knew this was the moment and stepped forward quickly without thinking any more. He had been thinking over a decade and was tired of that.

The man’s face flickered with sudden recognition and his mouth shaped a cry John was never to hear. He put up an arm and to John’s surprise there was no weapon in it. John hesitated for only an instant. He swung the branch as a club, once, twice, three—and the man’s head split open. Without saying another word.

He sat up from the blur of sleep and sucked in cloying, damp air, the reek of a room permanently perfumed. Utter blackness, which was unusual. For a long moment he could only remember the time-whorl and the Natchez and then the rest of it came back.

It had taken a day’s work to fashion a raft from blown-down trees at the riverside—the legacy of the whorl, he reckoned—and lash it firmly. He had lain on the raft for days with a fatigue he could not explain. He had the man’s clothes in a bundle and used it as a pillow but could not look at them beyond that. Fishing was poor and he was skeleton-thin by the time he saw the arcs above Cairo. He knew enough then to pole ashore, barely making it against the sharp reef-shaped current. Then he spent two days walking downstream, the time-pressure sickening him. He was eating leaves by the time he saw the distant church steeples of Cairo.

It had been hard to find any sort of job but with his belly full again he had thrown himself into it, getting two shifts of dock loader, sleeping and eating the rest of the time and not thinking much. He had saved his money and now after three weeks he had come and got this.

He sat up and ran his hands over the woman. She was better in the dark than to look at, all satin and black corset, garter belt and hose that made the creamy flesh somehow ripe to the point of near-rot. But he had been drawn to her in the big reception room downstairs. She had leaned on the upright piano and regarded him with sly, primeval eyes. He had refused the drink or entertainment normally due gentlemen callers, wanting to come upstairs and pay extra for the whole night. The first time should be really something special.

And it had indeed been fine. Like being seized by a great creature that had lived inside you all this time without your knowing, but now released, would never be put back.

He eased out from beneath the heavy quilt and lit an old brass oil lamp. The woman slept noisily, head back and mouth open, showing two missing teeth, through which whistled her moist sighs. An oddly urgent need made him pick up his scruffy knapsack and unlace its innermost compartment. He had carried all his valuables in it since his first days back in Cairo, out of a pervasive, floating insecurity. He usually worked with the sack on his back, afraid to even put it aside.

The papers were still there. Their reassuring official thickness he found pleasurable. Despite some blurring from John’s immersion in the river, Mr. Preston’s bold handwriting in his crew contract for the Natchez stood out, royal blue beneath the wavering liquid glow of the lamp.

People said the Natchez had not come back from its uptime voyage … not yet. Cairo dwelled so near the great timestorm arcs that its folks always spoke conditionally, ending their statements about events with so far and seems to be and in the sweet by and by and we’ll see.

John paged through the crew papers, treasuring their solidity. Yesterday he had been coming back through the stockyards, from a hauling job, and had run into Stan on a plank-board sidewalk. Or at least the young man looked for all the world like Stan, with sandy hair and certain distracted gaze. But he stared blankly at John and disavowed ever being on the Natchez or uprivering at all. When John had started to tell of what had happened the young man had said irritably, “Well then, you shouldn’t ought to have went!” and brushed by him.

John put back the papers and felt also deep in the pocket the wad of documents he had taken off his father. Probably time to look at them, he figured. As soon as the man had poured out his blood on the sand John had felt utter and profound release from the charge of over a decade, and had taken from the body only the papers and a leather belt.

There was little, mostly receipts and incidentals. But the dues book in the Pilots’ Association was different, cardboard-thick and consequential. The straight columns showed dues paid right on time, the secretary’s scribbled initials acknowledging them. John flipped forward to the front and found there in one single blistering instant not the name of his father at all, but that of himself.

The shock of it kept him rigid while the name itself, black ink set forth with a firm hand—a writing laborious and undeniable—loomed and oscillated in his gaze. Yet it was stone-solid, calling forth the sharp memories of that face in the desert, features lined and fearful but now completely and at last familiar.

The woman stirred and yawned, opened her large eyes. Slowly she smiled at the unmoving man who held scraps of paper and stared into nothing. With a thick-lipped smile as ancient as time she said languorously, “We got a right smart spell left, honey. Gobs of it. Honey? What you reaching up in the air for? Honey?”